Saturday, August 20, 2011

Ruffly Yellow Lamp!

I friggin love this lamp! I showed the exclusive premier of it over at Saved By Suzy earlier this week! Now you get to see how I did it!

I got my inspiration from Mandi at Vintage Revivals! She made two lamp shades using felt and burlap. I strongly considered burlap for my shade, but ultimately decided on muslin. For one, muslin is $1 cheaper per yard. Second, it doesn't have that strange smell that burlap has. And I just really wanted white on my shade!

Here is a ghetto photo of how the lamp looked before. Nothing wrong with it, just boring.

First I took the lamp outside to sand, prime, then spray paint. I think the color is Valspar Abundant Gold. It's something like that - it coated great! Be sure to tape off your cord and the top of the lamp. You don't want that getting all funky with spray paint.

Then I got to work on the lampshade. This is the time consuming part. Here's the before.

I bought three yards of white muslin @ $2.99/yard. I think I have almost two yards left, at least one and a half!

With the muslin still folded in half, I made a small incision with my scissors every three inches. Then I ripped all my strips. I decided to do this instead of cutting the strips. It created a more even edge and I like the soft, ruffly look.

You can refer to Mandi's post for better pictures of how to do this, but I just folded the three inch strip in half (long ways) and hot glued the end to the lamp shade. Then I glued about every two to three inches in a wavy pattern. Continue this until you're out of fabric, then start with your next strip. Keep going until your whole shade is covered. This part took the most amount of time, but it looks so awesome!

After you're done gluing everything there will be thin hot glue strings everywhere. Pull off all the thin hot glue strings (they look like spider webs to me) and pull or cut off any stray threads from the edge of the muslin. This cleans of the appearance of the ruffles and creates that soft edge.

I love it!!

I love it the most when the light is on! It creates a real ambient look through the shade!